k out sound business programs of work, exercise,
recreation, and regimen for body, mind, and spirit; while all that you
must contribute to the enterprise is the requisite comprehension,
time, money, and will-power. You see, I am not a professor of vital
commerce and investment; I am a stump-speaker, trying to induce the
voters to elect a sound business administration.

I believe that the blessings of climate give us of North America less
excuse than most other people for failing to put such an
administration into office. It is noteworthy that many of the
Europeans who have recently written their impressions of the United
States imagine that Colonel Roosevelt's brimming cup of vitality is
shared by nearly the whole nation. If it only were! But the fact that
these observers think so would seem to confirm our belief that our own
cup brims over more plentifully than that of Europe. This is probably
due to the exhilarating climate which makes America--physically, at
least, though not yet economically and socially--the promised land.

Of course I realize the absurdity of urging the great majority of
human beings to keep within their vital incomes. To ask the
overworked, under-fed, under-rested, under-played, shoddily dressed,
overcrowded masses of humanity why they are not exuberant, is to ask
again, with Marie Antoinette, why the people who are starving for
bread do not eat cake. The fact is that to keep within one's income
to-day, either financially or vitally, is an aristocratic luxury that
is absolutely denied to the many. Most men--the rich as well as the
poor--stumble through life three parts dead. The ruling class, if it
had the will and the skill, might awaken itself to fullness of life.
But only a comparatively few of the others could, because the world is
conducted on a principle which makes it even less possible for them to
store up a little hoard of vitality in their bodies against a rainy
day than to store up an overplus of dollars in the savings bank.

I think that this state of things is very different from the one which
the fathers contemplated in founding our nation. When they undertook
to secure for us all "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,"
they did not mean a bare clinging to existence, liberty to starve, and
the pursuit of a nimble happiness by the lame, the halt, and the
blind. They meant fullness of life, liberty in the broadest sense,
both outer and inner, and that almost certain success i